Brinkley: School debate shows deep divisions in Israel

Friday

A fight in Israel over a new university is a perfect metaphor illustrating the nation’s deep divisions — a fault line that further isolates Israel and presents a continuing danger to the world.

This month, an Israeli education council for the occupied West Bank declared a community college in a Jewish settlement to be a full-fledged university — prompting several hundred Israeli college professors, including some of the state’s most renowned academics, to write an angry letter to the state’s education minister, urging him to revoke the certification.

There’s little chance he will listen.

The debate over the Ariel University Center, as the school calls itself, has been under way for several years, but now it’s coming to a head.

With nearly 20,000 residents, Ariel is one of the West Bank’s largest Jewish settlements. It’s principally a bedroom community for people with jobs in Tel Aviv, 25 miles away. But, like most every settlement, its leaders and at least some residents are right-wing militants. When Israeli academics said they would boycott the school in Ariel, Ron Nachman, Ariel’s pugnacious mayor, retorted that he would respond by building ever more settlement homes.

As it is, Peace Now, an Israeli leftist group, published a report last month showing that the number of West Bank settlement homes increased by at least 20 percent last year so that the number of settlers is now approaching 350,000.

Echoing his predecessors, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sternly warned recently that Israel must pursue “a comprehensive Middle East peace” not only for the state’s own sake but also for the United States and the world.

For years now, Arab militants have cited as a primary grievance America’s unstinting support of Israel, no matter how it treats the Palestinians — or how many settlement homes it builds. Perhaps it’s just an excuse, but many in the Arab world reacted with genuine outrage when President Obama promised to veto the Palestinian’s request for statehood at the United Nations last fall.

The college in Ariel first opened in 1982 as simply a branch of Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. But in the settlers’ never-ending effort to establish facts on the ground intended to remake the West Bank as a part of Israel, they quickly seized on the idea of turning their small college branch into the West Bank’s first Israeli university. They broke off their association with Bar-Ilan in 2004 and began their quest.

In 2007, the college simply declared itself a university, but Israel’s Council for Higher Education refused to recognize the change. It ordered Ariel to “immediately cease” using the university appellation. Yaron Ezrahi, a prominent Hebrew University professor, decried what he called “the academization of the occupation.”

When the school formally changed its name to the Ariel University Center, Israel’s minister of justice called that illegal. But the settlers knew all they had to do was wait; the Israeli government was turning ever more right-wing.

Along the way, the school tried to enter a solar-power competition in Madrid with 20 participating universities. It was kicked out because Ariel is in occupied territory.

But in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud party took office and installed another right-winger, Gideon Sa’ar, as minister of education. Sa’ar also became chairman of the Council for Higher Education, giving Ariel a powerful ally.

The real breakthrough came from a most unusual place. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, formerly of the leftist Labor Party, gave his formal approval for the creation of Ariel University. Since the military controls the West Bank, Barak’s blessing held significant weight. Barak, who served as a Labor Party prime minister a decade ago, has proved to be an embarrassingly ambidextrous politician since then.

The problem now is that no one really knows who, if anyone, actually holds the authority to make this unprecedented declaration. And so it should be.

Not long ago, Ronen Cohen, a professor from Ariel, showed up for the International Society for Iranian Studies biennial conference, at the DoubleTree hotel in Santa Monica, Calif. But then one professor from England noted his institutional affiliation.

That immediately started an angry contretemps; 120 academics registered their objections in a letter to the organization, arguing that Ariel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power cannot populate a territory it occupies.

The Iranian studies group decided it didn’t want to get tangled up in this debate. But when Cohen showed up on stage for a scheduled conference panel that was supposed to include three other professors, he was all alone.

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Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

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